http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/politics/12PREX.html?pagewanted=all&position=L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, made a hurried return to Washington on Tuesday as Bush administration officials held an urgent round of meetings to discuss ways of speeding up the transfer of power to Iraqis.
The meetings reflected dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in Iraq and a growing conviction that Mr. Bremer must abandon his methodical plan to move gradually toward the election of an Iraqi government over a year or two, officials said.
As President Bush gave a Veterans Day speech vowing to stabilize Iraq, officials including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, huddled with Mr. Bremer in the White House Situation Room to plot ways of speeding the transfer of sovereignty.
The White House meeting came as the top American military commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, spoke of a "turning point" in the conflict.
General Sanchez outlined a new get-tough approach to combat operations in areas north and west of Baghdad, strongholds for loyalists of Saddam Hussein. Dispensing with euphemisms favored by many officials in the Bush administration in recent months, he described what 130,000 American troops were facing as a "war."
Speaking to reporters outside a Veterans Affairs hospital in Manchester, N.H., Wesley K. Clark, the retired general who is one of the nine candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, said the administration did not have an appropriate plan for how to get Iraq back on its feet after the end of major combat operations. "It's the obligation of any commander to have a success plan and know how to make it work," he said.